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Posts published by Lisa Margonelli

If you want to move four million gallons of gasoline from a refinery in New Jersey to gas stations in Baltimore, you’ll need a 400-foot-long double-hulled barge and a 5000-horsepower tugboat to push it. Then to pilot the load, you’ll need a crew of people willing to be away from their families for two weeks at a time while working six-hour shifts around the clock. And you’ll need about a billion dollars worth of liability coverage.

One morning this past April, I stood high up in the pilot house of the tug Java Sea as chief mate Jon Thomas prepared to move one such load of gasoline. Thomas works for K-Sea Transportation, one of the country’s largest coastal oil shippers, and he’s young and enthusiastic about the job of piloting fuel, which involves risks and responsibilities that would scare most of us.

Moving oil and gasoline is a dangerous business that most of us take for granted. Just how dangerous it is became clear to San Francisco Bay Area residents two weeks ago, when an 8,600-gallon gasoline tanker truck overturned, caught on fire and melted a whole section of the freeway, snarling traffic for weeks. Gasoline is such an ordinary part of our lives, it can seem benign. But the fact is, a single pound of gasoline mixed with air can release as much energy as 15 pounds of TNT.

I wanted to understand what it’s like to move these volatile fuels on a regular basis, so I asked the people at K-Sea if I could spend a day in New York Harbor watching them work.

Barges are a pokey and relatively unnoticed link in the giant oil-distribution chain of tankers and pipelines that connect producers and consumers around the globe. The industry calculates oil transport in ton-miles (the movement of one ton of petroleum – about 300 gallons – one mile). In 2004, 902 billion ton-miles of crude oil and petroleum products were moved within the United States alone, according to the Association of Oil Pipe Lines. Barges and tankers do more than a quarter of the work, and pipelines handle most of the rest.

As America’s demand for gasoline rises by one to two percent a year, and imports of crude oil and gasoline increase, barges are doing more work. When pipelines are full to capacity, barges take up the slack. When terminals for oil tankers are full, barges are used to shift oil from tankers to land. And when oil prices are volatile, as they are now, and traders are working to move oil from places where it’s cheap to places where it’s expensive, barges are especially in demand. John Thomas expects to have plenty of work for years to come.

Driving a fuel barge involves many more variables than, say, driving a minivan. Thomas looked down at the barge, which was connected to the dock not only by the usual tie-lines but also by snarls of pipes and tubes to load the gasoline and carry away flammable and smog-producing vapors. Men scurried around detaching hoses and casting off lines, while Thomas listened to two radios and scanned a real-time map of harbor traffic.

As Thomas aimed to avoid such obvious dangers as scraping against the pipes on the dock or backing into incoming traffic, he also had to contend with less visible forces. “You’ve got current angles and wind angles,” he said. A loaded barge tends to respond more to current, while an empty one will be more affected by wind. Because this barge was carrying gasoline, which is relatively light, the vessel rode about four feet higher in the water than a comparable load of crude would, which made it likely to catch more wind and perhaps less current. Just because barges are big and slow doesn’t mean they’re predictable.

The tug’s twin propellers began to pull the barge backward. Black soot belched from the smokestacks and the tug shuddered noisily, its engines rattling the staircases. As the barge slipped into the waterway, a smaller tug pushed on its nose. “One engine, stay with me,” Thomas radioed to the assisting tug. Tug and barge swung around and headed toward the Goethals Bridge on a trip that would take us around the north end of Staten Island to upper New York Harbor and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. Rick Falcinelli, a former tug pilot who is now K-Sea’s vice president of administration – and the person who brought me out on the barge – sighed and said, “Very boring. Just the way we like it.”

At any given moment, K-Sea’s 64 barges contain 147 million gallons of crude oil, fuel oil and gasoline. When I asked Falcinelli what he worries about most, he replied, “All of it.” Since 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil off the coast of Alaska, regulations on oil shipping have tightened, and financial liability for oil haulers has risen dramatically. Many ships and barges must be double hulled, and if a spill does occur, often not only the ship’s owners but also its crew members can be criminally prosecuted. Insurance costs have risen accordingly.

The stiffer rules appear to be successful at reducing spills: Between 1980 and 2000, the amount of oil spilled and the number of large spills fell by about half, according to an analysis that the Boston-based firm Environmental Research Consulting did for the Environmental Protection Agency. While barges account for a relatively small percentage of the oil spilled in the United States, K-Sea reports spills, some as little as half a gallon, to the National Response Center.

As the Java Sea made its way toward Baltimore, it became obvious that the harbor was filled with dangers. We passed half a dozen other oil barges and gravel barges, all advancing up the channel at a rapid clip. By the side was a huge tanker ship with “Protect the Environment. NO SMOKING” painted on its side. On an oil tanker, the note seemed strangely redundant.

Soon after leaving the refinery docks, we closed in on the Goethals Bridge, where welders were dropping sparks. Thomas radioed ahead to tell them to stop the “hot work” while we chugged underneath. Right. More than four million gallons of gasoline and a spark would make a very big fireball, a massive floating barbecue out of the Kill van Kull. But nothing happened, and we continued northeast towards the Bayonne Bridge.

The dangers of shipping gasoline are at odds with the our experience of using the stuff. Hoping to feel more secure on our highways, American drivers have bought bigger and bigger cars. And they have also found reason to drive more. Searching for quiet neighborhoods and good schools, workers have moved farther away from city centers, lengthening their commutes.

Every year since 1992, we’ve consumed more and more gasoline. And while industry efforts and regulations on oil and gasoline transport have cut the rate of accidents, the risk has increased anyway, thanks to the increasing amount of oil and gas we ship. From 1980 to 2003, for every billion ton-miles of petroleum and petroleum products, pipelines spilled 27 gallons of oil, trucks spilled 37 and barges spilled 15, according to Environmental Research Consulting. Our gasoline-fueled quest for safety has made Americans unwitting gamblers with our environment.

For the people who drive the tugs and live on the oil barges in the harbor, the risks are obvious. As the day went on, Falcinelli took me aboard other tugs. One tug would edge up to another, allowing us to step off the tire-bumpers of one and onto to those of the next. We ended the day on a tug that was piloting a barge full of fuel oil toward a container ship. “A floating gas station,” mate Matt Devlin called it, as we headed past Shooters Island, a former shipyard that is now a bird sanctuary, toward the docks of Elizabeth, N.J., and a row of container ships being unloaded by giant cranes.

Inside such containers are the things we take for granted — clothes, car parts, silverware, submersible pumps, deck chairs — all arriving from great distances, courtesy of the enormous quantities of cheap fuel that flow freely around the world. As someone who came “in through the hawsepipe” — the tugboat’s equivalent of working your way up from the mailroom — Devlin has never worked on a barge that carried anything but oil. “With this stuff you have to be careful,” he said, “All I’ve ever known is to be careful all of the time.”

An intricate pipeline system connects the storage caverns at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve site on Bryan Mound. (Credit: F. Carter Smith/Polaris, for The New York Times)

Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed to spend $65 billion from the government’s general fund to double the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For most Americans, the reserve, where 700 million barrels of oil have been stored since the late 1970s, is mostly an article of faith: Few know that it’s located deep underground in four sites on the Gulf Coast, and because those sites are considered vital to national security, hardly anyone has seen it. But it’s time to take a closer look at the reserve’s purpose, its usefulness and its cost. Before we invest another $65 billion in this underground bank of oil, we should ask ourselves what we’re really getting for the money.

Though the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is remote and not open to the public, I toured the largest of the sites, Bryan Mound, located in Texas, in the summer of 2003. Except for the security fences and sunburned young men carrying guns, it was a friendly place — balmy waterfront scrub overrun by migratory birds, and the occasional alligator or bobcat. The oil sits far out of sight, some 2000 feet below ground, in caverns in thick salt deposits.

The caverns are made by a technique called “solution mining,” which basically involves running water down into the salt and sucking out saltwater until a significant hole has been hollowed. The salt wraps itself around the oil like plastic, so the caverns don’t leak. They are, in fact, a miracle of salt engineering, and if it were possible to see them, they’d probably be as big a tourist draw as the Hoover Dam. But the petroleum reserve is pretty much invisible — and so is its ambiguous history.

The reserve was established in 1975, after the first Arab oil embargo cut exports to the United States, as a way to fight back against any future threats to our energy supply. Some called the reserve our own “oil weapon.” By the time it was completed in the early 1980s, however, embargoes were no longer a threat. Significant amounts of oil were being traded on the open market, so oil producers could no longer control who bought their oil.

Then the Strategic Petroleum Reserve gained a second life as an insurance policy against oil shortages and high prices. During the 1991 gulf war, the reserve stood by ready to pour more oil into the market in the event the conflict paralyzed production in the Persian Gulf. By allaying fears of a shortage, it theoretically could keep oil prices from spiking. Read more…

In the history of accidents, the March 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City, Tex., oil refinery might have been another Exxon Valdez — a catastrophe that changed the way we perceive and regulate the industry. But the BP disaster hasn’t captured the public’s imagination the way the 1989 Alaska oil spill did, even though the explosion killed 15 people and injured 180 more. Yesterday James Baker, the fix-it man for both the Iraq war and BP’s safety record, released a 374-page report on how BP’s corporate culture contributed to the disaster.

The findings were harsh — pointing fingers at people at the highest levels of the company for not paying enough attention to safety — and they helped persuade John Browne, BP’s chief executive, who once was considered a model oil company executive, to resign. But the soul searching should go way beyond Browne.

Most of us speed past refineries, with their steel towers and scary flares, never stopping to consider what goes on inside. Daily, refinery employees manage high pressures and volatile chemicals while pumping out millions of gallons of gasoline. If you want to see what it looks like when those systems are dangerously out of balance, watch this video re-enactment of the Texas City disaster, made by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. It shows a minute-by-minute reconstruction of flammable liquids overwhelming the plant’s safety devices and eventually blowing up.Read more…

“In America it’s bling bling, but out here it’s bling bang,” says Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie “Blood Diamond,” explaining how diamonds on American fingers play a role in conflict and death in Africa. Thanks to this film, diamonds are the taboo commodity of the moment — “All who touch it are left with blood on their hands,” intones the voice-over in the preview.

But many Americans don’t realize that the oil in our gas tanks, plastics, medicines, lubricants and cosmetics is implicated in an even larger bloody trade. From Nigeria to Iraq, Colombia, Chechnya and the Straits of Malacca, a growing global trade in illicit petroleum — as much as 750,000 barrels a day, or one percent of the world oil production — is providing money and weapons for violent conflict. And conflict oil is much trickier to manage than blood diamonds are. Most of us are like Ellen Barkin — we may have sentimental attachments to our jewels, but we’ll give them up the moment they start to seem icky. But no one, rich or poor, can really give up oil.

Almost two years ago, to explore the intersection of illicit oil and war, I traveled to the Niger Delta, where organized gangs steal crude oil from pipelines in a scheme that involves payoffs to local politicians and the military. Traveling on the creeks that weave through the Delta’s mangroves, I saw many barges stuffed with large plastic urns — each one taller than a man — full of oil, moving slowly downstream towards the sea and waiting tankers. No one knows exactly how much these clunky vessels and some more sophisticated boats carry — estimates range from 40,000 to 685,000 barrels a day. For years, oil companies have factored the theft into their spreadsheets.Read more…